Infant Research and Adult Treatment

Infant Research and Adult Treatment is the first synoptic rendering of Beatrice Beebe's and Frank Lachmann's impressive body of work. Therapists unfamiliar with current research findings will find here a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of infant competencies. These competencies give rise to presymbolic representations that are best understood from the standpoint of a systems view of interaction. It is through this conceptual window that the underpinnings of the psychoanalytic situation, especially the ways in which both patient and therapist find and use strategies for preserving and transforming self-organization in a dialogic context, emerge with new clarity.They not only show how their understanding of treatment has evolved, but illustrate this process through detailed descriptions of clinical work with long-term patients. Throughout, they demonstrate how participation in the dyadic interaction reorganizes intrapsychic and relational processes in analyst and patient alike, and in ways both consonant with, and different from, what is observed in adult-infant interactions. Of special note is their creative formulation of the principles of ongoing regulation; disruption and repair; and heightened affective moments. These principles, which describe crucial facets of the basic patterning of self-organization and its transformation in early life, provide clinical leverage for initiating and sustaining a therapeutic process with difficult to reach patients.

1. Introduction2. A Dyadic Systems View3. Interactive Reorganization of Self-Regulation: The Case of Karen4. Early Capacities and Presymbolic Representation5. Patterns of Early Interactive Regulation6. Coconstructing Inner and Relational Processes: Self- and Interactive Regulation in Infant Research and Adult Treatment7. Representation and Internalization in Infancy: Three Principles of Salience8. Three Principles of Salience in the Organization of the Patient-Analytic Interaction9. An Interactive Model of the Mind for Adult Treatment